Making Magical Experiences

...while finding the perfect design Solutions at the happiest job on earth!

The Walt Disney Company

...is a part of American history; it's a company chock-full of art and design culture deeply rooted in Walt's timeless values and visionary ideas that inspire everyone to this day.

Walt always said that he wanted the magic of his parks to continually grow over time and improve as the years progressed. He knew the power of innovative thinking and I get to harness that culture every day at my desk. He said, "You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality."

As Principle UX Designer, I have been honored to direct workflow and front-end design for multiple company-wide projects and applications. I work with the world's best engineers and business analysts to produce novel design solutions that answer the question, "How can we make this experience more magical?"

As Principle UX Designer for Launchpad and the new OneID onboarding process, I designed applications that fundamentally changed the way that Disney Business Units onboard to OneID and that tie them all together via Disney One ID including Playmation, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney Parks and Recreation.

Launchpad provides onboarding product teams a clear, more independent path for new and future products and the means totailor standard registration information as part of the Disney ID experience for every guest, viewer and Fan.

overview

The mission:

Disney Guest Login

To automate and streamline a manual process of documentation and hand-coding individual Client ID configuration in order to onboard a product.

The Disney Clients handle all of the configurations for our Guest Login experience and thus have literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations when accounting for Business Units, Age, Localized Rules, Geolocation, Permission requirements, Legal requirements, et al.

When a Disney Business Unit was looking to release a product they were looking at a process that was:

3 months to onboard

9 days to get a Client ID

Costly

Confusing

With High dependencies

Lengthy & complex

One size DOESN’T fit all

requirements

A single source of truth for ALL client configurations

A way to generate a configuration without the need for engineers

A way to track the progress no matter the role

Approvals built into the workflow

Configurations that are available for testing immediately

The Problem

Business Units are forced to wait for engineers to code a client configuration for any given product that is needed. The configuration must go through legal channels and therefore takes weeks or months before a test configuration can be used to develop a product causing delays for the product launch, sometimes by up to three months.

By understanding the roles involved in building a configuration that was ultimately tied to a Disney product I could break the workflow into 5 distinct parts and allow the Business Units to begin working on their product without being blocked by test configurations. A study and creation of personas was needed and applied to each part of the workflow, effectively breaking down the UI into 5 areas, Create a new Product, Create a product Client ID, Edit the configuration, Approve the configuration, and Submit/Launch Configuration.

The Work

Creating a workflow that’s divided into five interaction points, I needed to understand each workflow both independently according to each role using the features, but I also needed to keep in mind all of the integration points between the multiple workflows.

Information Architecture and Visual Design Solutions:

Prototyping and Usability Testing

Interaction Design Solutions:

ResultS

When Disney ID became ONE ID the mission to onboard as many products as possible and the mandate was made to make Launchpad the source for all Disney onboardings from that point forward. Now Launchpad is being restructured as a platform to launch all onboarding for a variety of Disney services in order to save time and money in all Disney internal areas.

Total Product Adoption (Onboarding) By Product Amount

Onboarding:in as little as 3 days, not 3 months. Resulting in more than 90% adoption company-wide by all BUs.

Integrate with staging:less than 20 minutes, not 9 days

Cost savings: Total onboarding in Production~46% on average

Ensures compliance with Brand and Legal

Quicker turnaround times

Data collection visibility and reporting

Increase internal efficiencies

Empowers BUs – informs stakeholders

Governance and Guidelines

Marvel-ous Technology

I worked one-on-one with developers to produce a unique, 100% functional authoring tool to be used as a connected-toy story-writing tool and to be utilized alongside other development tools such as Sublime and Webstorm.

To support the tool I designed and built a branded color specification system based upon popular Disney color palettes to be used throughout all related documentation, design and authoring environments, including a custom XML color scheme for Sublime and an importable color palette for Apple and Adobe products.

Kevin’s creativity and dedication to the details are spot-on. He knows how to design rapidly, and render them in code with pixel precision.

Codenamed "EMagine", I led all Interaction and Visual Design for the Playmation project by utilizing research, gathering user data via usability testing, and determining final UI solutions based upon existing Disney UI standards. In addition, I built a reusable CSS3 framework using modularized SCSS which utilizes the Marvel and Star Wars color specification system.

Guerilla Usability Testing

Part of my responsibility for the main projects we have been building is to determine areas of success and failure in the interfaces and prototypes we build. Not just inside the UI, but also inside the workflows. Because of the rapid nature of our work, it has been necessary to find ways to test on-the-fly. We decided on Silverback and Usabilla to screen capture both user interactions and click-throughs. My methodology emerged as the following:

In order to highlight areas of UI success

Establish patterns

Insinuate new patterns from existing UI

Isolate UI pieces to modularize

In order to pinpoint UI failures

Understand how different users affect expectations of the UI

Understand the micro-interactions that lead up to a failure

Determine whether there are anti-patterns causing failure

Determine missing functionality that causes failures

Usability Test Types:

Linked Tests/Funnel Test

Label Tests

Screen Capture

Playmation Connected Device Authoring Interface

I produced multiple documents based upon the Screen Capture Testing, which I then organized into areas of quantitative data.

Organized as:

Key takeaways

Highlighted user comments from testing

Suggested areas of improvement

Minor takeaways

Then I organized the Screen Capture Testing alongside Usabilla Linked and Label Testing in order to correlate user comments with actual collected click-through data.

Disney User Experience:

Working to unite our design family

I have had the opportunity to work with the world's best designers and artists, who took me under their wing and asked for my contribution to the Disney User Experience (DUX) initiative. Starting from day one, I worked closely with veteran Disney UX cast members to extend existing UX patterns and standards, as well as propose novel solutions for integration into the Disney ecosystem.

While working on UX standards, I led all Interaction and Visual Design for a high-profile, unannounced project by utilizing research, gathering user data via usability testing, and determining final UI solutions based upon existing Marvel and Disney UI standards.

Part of this work was establishing a unified visual language using both an existing glyph system (Font Awesome) plus create additional iconography, fully integrated into Mac OSX.

Along with this I supported the front-end development team by building a reusable CSS3 framework from scratch using modularized SCSS which utilizes the color specification system, in order to further support standards by code extension.